To achieve high areal density for current magnetic storage drives, energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) is commonly applied. In EAMR, the recording medium is locally heated to decrease the coercivity of the magnetic material during write operations. The local area is then rapidly cooled to retain the written information. This allows for magnetic write heads to be used with high coercivity magnetic materials. The heating of a local area may be accomplished by, for example, a heat or thermal source such as a laser. As such, one type of energy-assisted magnetic recording is heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR).
Conventional HAMR media is typically composed of a substrate, a heat sink layer, seed and nucleation layers, and a magnetic recording layer. Desirable properties of the magnetic recording layer in HAMR media include a moderate Curie temperature and a uniform, well-segregated, high magnetic anisotropy grain structure with highly developed crystallographic texture. Writing to magnetic media in HAMR involves heating a localized area of the media to temperatures near or above the Curie temperature of the storage layer. This is done to locally lower the coercivity of the media. The direction of magnetization in the recorded bit is then set by an applied field. The recording process in HAMR media is important for defining the magnetization transitions. Sharp, well defined transitions are needed in order to achieve high recording linear densities. As such, an improved magnetic media for HAMR applications that can provide such well defined transitions to achieve the high recording linear densities is desirable.